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The practice of breakfast

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Always an early riser, I often walked in on my father as he was preparing breakfast, the first rays of sunlight pouring through the kitchen windows. Sixty years on, the morning meal remains profoundly personal for me.

A deeply spiritual man and life-long seeker, Daddy had been at the dining room table since 5 a.m. reading scripture, meditating, praying, writing, and planning his day. He then moved into the kitchen for the next phase of his morning’s work.

Monday-through-Friday’s menu seldom varied for our family of seven. Eggs — often scrambled, although he later offered a great sunny-side-up version for those who preferred that option — were first on the plate. Bacon went next; two slices if memory serves, but it seldom is infallible these days. Toast with jam filled out the menu. A glass of milk, and later coffee as we aged out of one drink and into the other, sat on each place mat. Our food came with a helping of WSM morning radio on the side. Some people begin their day with the meditative stylings of Enya or George Winston. Our ambient music was Flatt and Scruggs.

Once the food was ready for the table, my father made sure we were all up and moving. “Rise and shine” was his favorite wake-up call. Some of us took it more literally than others. Mother, a habitual night owl, fell into the latter camp. Because he often rode his bike to work, Daddy was out the door before 6:45 a.m. As we grew older, we helped mother with the clean-up and getting ourselves off to school or summer jobs.

Rise & Shine merch from Ellie’s, our favorite bakery in Providence, RI

How I prepare and eat breakfast has changed through the years, but it has always been grounded in those memories. The realization came slowly, but over time it occurred to me that my father used breakfast as part of a morning practice, well before that term came to mean what it does today. When he walked into the Tennessee Valley Authority office at 7 a.m., he had already centered his soul, stimulated his mind, cheerfully provided for his family, and exercised. We could all do much worse in beginning our days.

Unconsciously at first, but more recently with deeper intention, I’ve followed in his footsteps.

The Buddhist monk and writer Thich Nhat Hanh first came to my attention in Barbara Brown Taylor’s Holy Envy. My wife, who is reading from Thich Nhat Hanh’s book of daily wisdom entitled Your True Home, recently asked me to listen to his take on a mindful breakfast.

“Even a daily habit like eating breakfast, when done as a practice, can be powerful. It generates the energy of mindfulness and concentration that makes life authentic. When we prepare breakfast, breakfast making can also be a practice. We can be really alive, fully present, and very happy during breakfast making. We can see making breakfast as mundane work or as a privilege — it just depends on our way of looking. The cold water is available. The hot water is available. The soap is available. The kettle is available. The fire is available. The food is available. Everything is there to make our happiness a possibility.”

As she read to me, it began to come together that with a few mindful changes, I could follow in the footsteps of my father’s morning practice. The opportunity to begin with a centering morning practice was always there for me, if I simply chose to follow the example I’d known my entire life.

Having recently put aside my electronic devices, my day now begins with a short reading followed by stretching and yoga poses, to limber both mind and body. Soon after my semi-retirement, I refashioned my morning walk from the metro station to the office into a regular stroll around the neighborhood. A shower to refresh for the day was followed by breakfast. Finally, instead of reading 30 minutes each way during my commutes to-and-from the office, I now sit in a comfortable chair by the window with a cup of coffee and read a book as part of my “non-commute”.

By the time I head upstairs to the “office,” I am well on my way to being centered, limber, and happily fed. The next step was to choose to make breakfast integral to my morning practice.

Coffee in the pot with my collection of favorite mugs

Breakfast was the one piece of my morning that wasn’t terribly mindful. Oh, I have routines for making breakfast that are generally well-considered and fit my empty-nest stage of life. The smell of coffee, prepared the night before, greets me. One of my favorite mugs, perhaps from Powell’s in Portland or the one “stolen” from the City Cafe in Murfreesboro, is waiting beside the freshly brewed pot.

But until recently, I prepared the meal more by rote (which is possible when you have the same menu), and I would eat each bite without much consideration for what, or how much, was going into my mouth. I acted as if there were more important things to focus on in the newspaper or on my tablet. My habit of devouring food is a sore subject for those near to me. Slowing down to savor the meal is, I’m afraid, a work in progress.

Tom Brown, in his 80s, still cooking breakfast…this time on Christmas Eve at my sister Debbie’s house

When I’m mindful of the practice of breakfast, I stop to appreciate the smell of the coffee before I begin preparation of the fixings for the eggs. Stepping back to focus on the details of the prep has led me to think of this meal in relation to others I’m having that day. My thoughts sometimes turn to how both of my adult children — who now live away from home — are lovers of a good breakfast and know how to fix one. For that I’m thankful. I know that upstairs Candice is somewhere along the path of her well-considered morning practice. As Thich Nhat Hanh says, everything is there to make my happiness a possibility.

Now, after savoring my food and reading during my non-commute, I head up to the desk where I’ll spend the rest of my morning. As I do so, I think of Tom Brown walking into the old office building by the substation in Murfreesboro and give thanks for the example of the practice of breakfast that was there in front of me, all along.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Markéta Machová from Pixabay

John Pizzarelli’s timeless take on the American Songbook

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John Pizzarelli, the world-renowned guitarist and singer, is the son of legendary jazz guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, who died just over a year ago on April 1, 2020. The family, which also includes the double bassist Martin Pizzarelli, is jazz royalty. This week in Saturday Soundtrack, we’ll celebrate the music of John Pizzarelli.

Bucky was a long-time member of The Tonight Show Band, where he played with a wide variety of musicians and in different musical genres. John clearly got his start at a very early age, and both father and son play the seven-string guitars popularized in jazz circles by George Van Eps.

On the jazz standard I’ve Got Rhythm, you can hear John play his Moll seven-sting and sing in his easy-going crooner style…until he begins scatting with the lead at the 51 second mark. Then, oh my goodness! Extra bonus points if you figure out where the pick was hiding that shows up just before that solo. Oh yes, and the chord inversions are just wonderful.

Speaking of chord inversions, I always marveled at how those jazz cats could put their fingers down seemingly anywhere on a fretboard and make a beautiful chord that is just right for that passing phrase. Take a listen to the changes in this solo arrangement of How High the Moon.

“John has established himself as a prime contemporary interpreter of the Great American Songbook and beyond, with a repertoire that includes Paul McCartney, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, Tom Waits, Antonio Carlos Jobim, and the Beatles.“

A recent home recording from the American Songbook of Sinatra’s The Way You Look Tonight is played on his acoustic seven-string. The amazing solo (there always seems to be one) begins about the 1:50 mark and it brings out an appreciative ovation from the family. In a recording from The Paste Studio, Pizzarelli continues in the acoustic vibe on Baubles, Bangles, and Beads.

In 2019, John honored the centennial of the legendary singer and pianist Nat King Cole with a selection of his classics. I love Pizzarelli’s arrangement and the video of (Get Your Kicks On) Route 66, one of Cole’s major hits.

The trio also has a beautiful arrangement of Cole’s It’s Only a Paper Moon with a very nice solo by Konrad Paszkudzki on piano.

Pizzarelli just won a Grammy for producing James Taylor’s recent foray into the Great American Songbook. If you go to YouTube and type in John Pizzarelli, you can go down a rabbit hole and never come out.

I would suggest there are much worse ways to spend a few hours!

Enjoy, and have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

Image: John Pizzarelli, from his Facebook post “It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere”

Weekly Reader: The catcher was a spy

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Only one man has his professional baseball cards in the CIA museum in Langley, Virginia. The museum’s label is titled MORRIS (MOE) BERG BASEBALL CARDS and it reads in part:

Following his 15-year career with five different major league teams, the Princeton-educated Berg served as a highly successful Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operative during World War II. Among his many missions on behalf of the OSS, the former catcher was charged with learning all he could about Hitler’s nuclear bomb project…Because of his intellect, Moe Berg is considered the “brainiest” man to have played the game.”

The true story is a bit more complicated.

As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles (or in this case a book) that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.

You would be forgiven if in reading the headline, you assumed this was another rant about the cheating ways of the Houston Astros. It is not. Instead, as part of my regular “spring training” regimen, I read a book on baseball and watch the movie Bull Durham to prep for the season. This year, I turned to the entertaining and exceptionally well-researched 1995 book by Nicholas Dawidoff, The Catcher was a Spy: The mysterious life of Moe Berg. I came late to this story and missed the movie entirely. Nonetheless, I was immediately enthralled after diving into this work a few weeks ago. Baseball stories, if well crafted, can be timeless, like the game itself.

Moe Berg was seen as different from any other baseball player even during his playing career. Legendary manager Casey Stengel described Berg as “the strangest man ever to play baseball”. As Dawidoff recounts in this page-turner of a book, Berg enjoyed “being” a baseball player more than he enjoyed “playing” baseball. The rhythms of the season, the copious amount of free time both during and between seasons, the ability to sit in the bullpen and tell stories, the travel and the first-class accommodations all suited the life he wanted to build for himself. Following his stint in major league baseball, Berg — like many bright young men of the day — entered the war to fight the Nazis. Again, the life of a spy in the free-wheeling OSS fit his personality, and he worked, among other assignments, to uncover the status of Germany’s atomic bomb program. The fact that he could speak several languages and read even more, had no real personal connections to tie him down, and was bright enough to understand more physics than the average person made him a useful operator for the new spy agency. His life began to change as the war wound down and it was found that the Nazi’s did not have a real atomic program to speak of. The buttoned-down CIA was not interested in keeping a free-lancing amateur sleuth employed during the Cold War.

Depending on your outlook, Berg’s unconventional life — where he lived the last 25 years unemployed, virtually homeless, and dependent on the goodness of others, including a sister and a brother — could be seen as extremely sad and unfulfilled. And yet he had many admirers and supporters such as the publisher Sayre Ross, who kept him afloat after they first met in 1967.

“‘It was better than reading books to listen to him,’ he says. ‘He was a great storyteller. He was an embellisher, and who the hell wasn’t. His language was a weapon of description. He colored it because people were interested.'”

After his death, Berg’s sister — who was estranged from Dr. Sam, their brother — took Moe’s remains to Israel where a rabbi suggested an unknown burial place. Dawidoff states that this made “the final mystery of Moe Berg’s inscrutable life” the fact that nobody knows where he is buried. But the author turns to making sense of that life in a thoughtful and sympathetic final chapter. His immigrant father’s driving discipline clearly marked all three of his children. Berg may have lived the way he did because he did not believe the tales he told others about his life.

“He never said what he really thought of himself, but his actions suggest that he saw Moe Berg as a mediocre ballplayer, a scholar only within the unlearned community of baseball, and an intelligence agent whose work had come to nothing.”

But Berg did a great deal with his life, asserts Dawidoff.

“He gained admission to two of the most rarefied clubs in the world — professional baseball and professional espionage — and for a brief time, his service in each compared favorably with anyone’s. As a spy working in Europe for the OSS, Berg was at the center of the seminal event of his time, the building of an atomic bomb, and his performance was exemplary. Some of Berg’s other accomplishments are a matter of degree. He was no scientist, but he learned more physics than most people. He was not formally a linguist, but he was a sensitive and appreciative student of languages, and knew a lot about them.”

But his most compelling accomplishment, from Dawidoff’s perspective, is what he did after the war. Trained at Princeton and Columbia Law, he could have been an big-time corporate lawyer. With a willingness to bend to the rules, he could have been a brilliant CIA agent. Instead, he lived the life he wanted, wherever it took him.

“Berg molded himself into a character of fantastic complication who brought pleasure and fascination to nearly everyone he brushed against during his fitful movements around the world. In the end, there are few men who find ways to live original lives. Moe Berg did that.”

My spring training ritual was a little late this year…which fit perfectly with the Washington Nationals’ opening day challenges, which began late after a cancelled series due to Covid-19. However, in the end, the Nats found an original way to persevere. As Thomas Boswell wrote in The Washington Post back on April 7th, Opening Day at Nationals Park was the culmination of 18 months — and 50 years — of waiting.

“One day can encapsulate 50 years. Not often. But Tuesday at Nationals Park did it for me.

Because of an outbreak that left nine Washington players in coronavirus protocols, the Nationals were forced to call up Hernán Pérez, elevate Andrew Stevenson from reserve to starter and sign catcher Jonathan Lucroy off the street just to field an Opening Day lineup against the Atlanta Braves.

With due respect to all major leaguers, that trio was weaker on paper than the sixth, seventh and eighth hitters in the Washington lineup in its final game as the Senators in 1971 — Dave Nelson, Del Unser and Tom Ragland — or the players in those slots in the first game of the new Nats in 2005 — Vinny Castilla, Terrmel Sledge and Brian Schneider.

Three anchors. So in the second inning, Pérez singled, Stevenson crushed a bullet through Atlanta’s alarmed second baseman (ruled an error) and both scored when Lucroy doubled.“

Of course, ace Max Scherzer allowed four home runs to the the first 10 batters he faced, so you knew it wouldn’t be easy. But the Nats came back to win when young superstar Juan Soto walked off the Braves with a single in the bottom of the 9th. With that, Boswell celebrated.

“This is baseball — quintessentially unpredictable, any-day-can-astound-or-amuse-us baseball. This is the game that Washington had from 1901 through 1971, lost for 33 years and now, in the culmination of a multigenerational cycle, celebrated again in full-throated yet pandemic-bizarre fashion as the Nats raised their 2019 World Series title banner before the opener.“

Yep, it is a long strange season and much can happen. But now that I’m through spring training, it is time to play ball!

More to come…

DJB

Digital declutter

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Well before pandemic-forced quarantines, much of my time was spent in voluntary self-seclusion. How? By staring at my phone or tablet instead of making real connections with people.

The wake-up call for change came with the compulsory isolation of lockdown.

As we enter the next phase of whatever it is our lives are to become after the pandemic, there is the opportunity to answer our wake-up calls. As the old adage suggests, never let a serious crisis go to waste. If we too easily accepted bad habits as inevitable in a year of lockdown, it may be time to ditch that negative thinking. On the other hand, if we purposefully chose to use our year for good perhaps we can work to consolidate and build upon personal gains.

Cal Newport‘s 2019 book Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World was recommended by a friend and former colleague, and it immediately resonated with work I’d been doing during 2020 to address the love/hate relationship with my smartphone. It was time to make permanent the digital declutter I’d struggled to adopt throughout the year.

When Newport begins by quoting the commentator Andrew Sullivan’s 2016 essay for New York magazine titled “I Used to Be a Human Being,” I instinctively understood the premise about surviving an endless bombardment of news and gossip and images.

Like Newport, I was not overly engaged with many of the best-known social media platforms, having deleted my Facebook account in 2013. Yet, there was still a feeling of being overwhelmed by the perceived need to keep up with the news, to grow enraged at the latest atrocity, to see what hundreds of business “friends” on LinkedIn were doing at the moment, and to text and email and “like” and post emojis as a way to stay “connected” while feeling increasingly drained and unsatisfied.

It was exhausting.

What I was missing with my scattershot approach is what Newport calls a full fledged “philosophy of technology use,” rooted in deep personal values. Today’s technology mixes harm with benefits in a way that sucks one into overuse and manipulated addiction unless you step back and consider “what tools you should use and how you should use them.” Equally important, says Newport, such an approach “enables you to confidently ignore everything else.”

Newport covers ground that others have explored, especially around the manipulation used by technology companies to capture our attention and drive clicks. But beyond a thoughtful summary of the lopsided arms race with the giants of technology, the real value in Newport’s book is a clear pathway towards digital minimalism, which he defines as

“A philosophy of technology use in which you focus your online time on a small number of carefully selected and optimized activities that strongly support things you value, and then happily miss out on everything else.“

He suggests three principles underpinning digital minimalism:

  • Clutter is costly;
  • Optimization is important; and
  • Intentionality is satisfying.

Newport’s path is one I’ve taken over the past month to enact my personal digital decluttering:

  • Take a break from optional technologies for 30 days;
  • During the break, explore and rediscover activities and behaviors you find satisfying; and
  • At the end of the break, reintroduce optional technologies, starting from a blank slate and recognizing what value each serves in your life.

There are a number of practices Newport calls upon to get through the declutter process, and I especially appreciated his use of a National Trust historic site, President Lincoln’s Cottage to illustrate the value of solitude. As the poet Wendell Berry has said, “We enter solitude, in which also we lose loneliness.” It takes solitude to focus.

In my personal month of digital decluttering, I removed the apps from my smartphone and tablet that beckoned to me when I was bored. I took off my Fitbit with its incessant buzzes to remind me to get up and move. The weather and Google maps remain on my phone, but if I find myself checking the temperature more than once a day, it serves as a reminder of how dependent I have become upon my devices. Thankfully, the weather seldom changes and I quickly lose interest.

Then there was the consideration of the places where I tended to reflexively reach for my smartphone. It has been hard at times, but I’ve generally followed the conscious decision to act in a different manner when I find myself in those places.

We still have home delivery of the Washington Post and New York Times. Rather than read them online which was my default, I’ve put aside my tablet at breakfast and work my way through one or both papers on a daily basis. Who knew the Post still had the comics? I’ve also become a fan of the obituaries, to read about lives well lived. Neither one showed up regularly in my algorithm-developed list of online stories, probably because they didn’t provoke outrage and drive clicks.

And I’ve done the unthinkable by leaving my smartphone at home. Newport writes about why this is so difficult, and yet why it is necessary to cut the imaginary cord that ties us to this tool. I’ve walked out with my phone still attached to its charger and the world didn’t end.

Most importantly, I’ve focused on what I truly value. My time reading has increased, as has the time spent with my guitars. I have been able to focus on professional and personal writing projects. Conversations have extended beyond just the dining room table. My phone has been used — get this — as a phone much more frequently. Rather than dealing with something via email, I’ve taken to suggesting a phone call. As a result, I’ve talked with friends and colleagues I haven’t seen in years. My actions around technology have also freed me to focus on a couple of projects that are especially meaningful at this point in my life.

Digital Minimalism has helped me begin the process to perform a personal reset following the pandemic. And that timing seems just right.

Have a good week.

More to come…

DJB

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

The Steeldrivers continue exploring the heartbreak of broken affairs

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“Guitars, whiskey, guns, and knives / Three’s a crowd and four’s a fight,” is just one of a dozen memorable lines from The Steeldrivers‘ catalog showing how the band has made a living exploring the heartbreak of broken affairs (or what Dolly Parton calls “sad ass” songs.) In spite of personnel changes, this Saturday Soundtrack will look at how the band continues making their own distinctive mark on that well-trodden road.

Songs of drinking, fighting, and bad loving pour out of The Steeldrivers like illegal corn liquor from an upended still. One commentator noted that a trio of dysfunctional relationship songs starts their album Hammer Down; however, it is something of an anomaly if one of their tunes doesn’t go down this path. Over the course of a show, they will sing some of the best sad country phrases around:

  • “Drinking dark whiskey, tellin’ white lies / One leads to another, on a Saturday night.”
  • “If you can’t be good, be gone.”
  • “You put the hurt on me like I never felt before.”
  • And the classic: “Never woulda loaded up a 44 / Put myself behind a jailhouse door / If it hadn’t been, if it hadn’t been for love.”

This Nashville-based bluegrass band with day jobs as songwriters and session musicians has shown up on More to Come for years after I first mentioned their performance at Merlefest in 2009. In 2011, I wrote a review of their live show at the Ram’s Head in Annapolis. Their third album, Hammer Down, was included in my list of best bluegrass albums of 2013 when I highlighted traits that have remained with the band through changes in personnel: great songwriting, soulful vocals, and skillful instrumental treatments. In 2015, I again highlighted a Steeldrivers album — The Muscle Shoals Recordings — as being among my list of best roots music of that year. (It later won the Grammy for Best Bluegrass album that year.) The following year I wrote about Adele’s cover of the band’s song If It Hadn’t Been for Love. And I’ve also featured the band when showcasing their original lead singer — the soulful Chris Stapleton — as well as in my New Year’s Eve ode to drinking songs from 2020.

After the Muscle Shoals album, the band seemed destined for new heights. But singer Gary Nichols decided to go his own way and the band was once again facing the need to reset. To go along with original members Richard Bailey (banjo), Tammy Rogers (fiddle), and Mike Fleming (bass), they had already added Brent Truitt on mandolin. Replacing the lead singer to follow Stapleton and Nichols was harder, but after a while they found one in a 25-year-old rock and roll singer from Berea, KY named Kelvin Damrell.

The choice isn’t as strange as it sounds. The band has always had a soul and R&B vibe that is unique among bluegrass bands. Damrell simply had to figure out how his vocal talents fit in this context. The band — which has always prided itself on its songwriting — also took the time to work on new material, primarily led by Rogers and her collaborators.

Bad For You, the band’s fifth album, arrived after this period of adaptation. And having covered so much of the band’s earlier work on More to Come, that 2020 album is what I want to focus on for this edition of the Saturday Soundtrack. The title track, shown here in a live video, opens the album. It sounds like a classic Steeldriver song, full of desperation and danger, with the harmonies and skill you’d expect from Nashville professionals.

The Bartender, shown as part of a series of performances from The Paste Studios, contains another great line of dysfunction. “Some may call me a sinner / but when its all said and done / I don’t pull the trigger / I just load the gun” captures the main character wrestling with his “role as a friend-in-need…or an accessory to a crime.”

Lonely and Being Alone (as in “there’s a difference in lonely and being alone”) is classic country bluegrass. Written by Rogers with Verlon Thompson, it makes the point that just because we’re by ourselves, that “doesn’t mean we’re lonely. We’re alone, and we’re good with that” as one reviewer noted. I Choose You is upbeat, by Steeldriver standards, and is about devotion over dysfunction. What a concept!

The Paste Studio session includes one old Steeldriver song from the Stapleton years, Blue Side of the Mountain. Damrell shows he can handle the band’s classic tunes as well, which will be a relief to Steelheads everywhere.

The Steeldrivers are beginning to tour again, and they will be at the historic Birchmere music hall in Alexandria, Virginia, on July 29th, if everything continues to improve on the pandemic front.

This is a band to catch live, so keep an eye out for when they may be coming to your city over the next year.

Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

Image from The SteelDrivers | Bad For You (photo credit: Anthony Scarlatti)

Thank God for the poets…and libraries

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April is National Poetry Month. “Many Americans, probably a vast majority of Americans, feel they can get along just fine without poetry” writes Margaret Renkl in a recent New York Times opinion piece entitled Thank God for the Poets. But we really need poets, just like we really need libraries. Our Weekly Reader will begin with a celebration of both.

As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.

Renkl’s take on American’s need for poetry continues:

“But tragedy — a breakup, a cancer diagnosis, a sudden death — can change their minds about that, if only because the struggle to find words for something so huge and so devastating can be overwhelming. “Again and again, this constant forsaking,” Natasha Trethewey calls it in her poem “Myth.”

Renkl began her piece with a nod to the poet Amanda Gorman, who spoke at President Biden’s inauguration.

“Ms. Gorman’s poem — addressed to “Americans, and the World” — was timeless in that way of the most necessary poems, but it was more than just timeless. After a year of losses both literal and figurative, she offered a salve that soothed, however briefly, our broken hearts and our broken age.

Poets have always given voice to our losses at times of national calamity. Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is an elegy for Abraham Lincoln. Langston Hughes’s “Mississippi — 1955” came in direct response to the murder of Emmett Till. Denise Levertov wrote one poem after another after another to protest the war in Vietnam. In 2002, Billy Collins delivered a memorial poem for the victims of the Sept. 11 attacks before a special joint meeting of Congress.“

But suffering isn’t the only time when we need poetry.

“Thank God for our poets, here in the mildness of April and in the winter storms alike, who help us find the words our own tongues feel too swollen to speak. Thank God for the poets who teach our blinkered eyes to see these gifts the world has given us, and what we owe it in return.“

Vartan Gregorian, who passed away on April 15th, was a scholar and a university leader, including an important time as president of Brown University where my son is an alumnus. Most importantly, however, Gregorian was a lover of libraries. Robert D. McFadden wrote about this aspect of his life in the New York Times obituary Vartan Gregorian, Savior of the New York Public Library, Dies at 87.

“By 1981, when the feelers went out to Dr. Gregorian, the library — the main research edifice at 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue and 83 branches in Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island — was broke, a decaying Dickensian repository of 7.7 million books (the world’s sixth largest collection), many of them rare and valuable, gathering dust and crumbling on 88 linear miles of stacks.

The underpaid, overworked staff was demoralized. The beautiful Gottesman Exhibition Hall had been partitioned into cubicles for personnel and accounting. Tarnished chandeliers and lighting fixtures were missing bulbs. In the trustees’ board room, threadbare curtains fell apart at the touch. Outside, the imperious marble lions, Patience and Fortitude, and the portals they guarded, were dirt-streaked. Bryant Park in the back was infested with drug dealers and pimps and unsafe after dark.“

Gregorian, coming out of academia, seemed to be an odd choice to bring the institution back to life.

To Dr. Gregorian, the challenge was irresistible. The library was, like him, a victim of insult and humiliation. The problem, as he saw it, was that the institution, headquartered in the magnificent Carrère and Hastings Beaux-Arts pile dedicated by President William Howard Taft in 1911, had come to be seen by New York City’s leaders, and even its citizens, as a dispensable frivolity.

And his vision for what the library should be carried the day.

“‘The New York Public Library is a New York and national treasure,’ he said. ‘The branch libraries have made lives and saved lives. The New York Public Library is not a luxury. It is an integral part of New York’s social fabric, its culture, its institutions, its media and its scholarly, artistic and ethnic communities. It deserves the city’s respect, appreciation and support. No, the library is not a cost center! It is an investment in the city’s past and future!’”

Two recent stories on race in America showed how some institutions are making change, even if ever-so-slowly, while a third demonstrates that others that need a reckoning have yet to take those steps.

The University of the South (known as Sewanee to most) has a long history as a bastion of white male privilege. But as Nick Anderson writes in the Washington Post, the school’s first Black vice chancellor and president is helping the school face that past in ‘We are not leaving’: Sewanee’s first Black leader helps propel a racial reckoning at university. Ian Shapira, also writing in the Washington Post, chronicles the changes in another Southern school in his article VMI selects Cedric Wins as first Black superintendent amid racism investigation. Both are worth a read to see what has driven this change and the barriers to progress.

However, not every institution is taking the need to change seriously. The Atlanta baseball team, in my estimation, has been in need of a moral center for a while, and Jesse Spector, writing in Deadspin, captures my feelings on the subject in Once again the Atlanta Baseball Team proves itself a shrieking fraud on caring about Black people.

“You mean to say that a baseball franchise with a racially insensitive name, which does all it can to harm any argument that their name isn’t just insensitive, but outright racist, by encouraging its fans to do racist chants; which moved out of team’s urban core and into another county, in order to cater to its white fans, while positioning the ballpark better for driving than mass transit; which relegated a memorial patch for the greatest player in team history to a tiny number on the back of its caps, rather than a sleeve patch…

…that team booted its response to Major League Baseball moving the All-Star Game out of Atlanta?!“

Yep. That team.

“When you move your team to the suburbs for the specific purpose of getting away from Black people, you don’t get to act like stripping a big event from your ballpark is going to hurt Black people. And the once-in-a-generation event can still return to Atlanta in a few years, just as the Super Bowl came back to Arizona once the state finally recognized Martin Luther King Day as a holiday.“

Washington Post columnist Max Boot asks and then answers his own question in: Why is the GOP waging a culture war? Follow the money.

“I’m no economic determinist, but if you want to understand how the right got the way it is, follow the money. The GOP highlights culture-war issues to shake down rank-and-file donors while cutting taxes to please wealthy donors. Republicans have won the presidential popular vote only once since 1988, but they can’t afford to broaden their appeal by embracing a more populist economic agenda or by toning down the divisive social messages because either move would jeopardize the flow of fundraising. The right-wing money machine has become the tail wagging the Republican elephant.“

Finally, let me recommend three articles from recent stories in the news to wrap up this Weekly Reader. The covid-19 vaccines are an extraordinary success story. The media should tell it that way writes Leana S. Wen in The Washington Post.

“An infection rate of 5,800 infections out of 77 million fully vaccinated people is less than 0.008 percent — a remarkably low rate. Compare this with 68,000 daily new infections in the United States — which, over a 30-day period, is nearly 100 times higher than the infection rate for those vaccinated. Put another way: A total of 5,800 infections among the inoculated is orders of magnitude better than 68,000 infections per day in the general population.“

Next, Anand Giridharadas interviews ProPublica investigative reporter Alec MacGillis in The Ink on the power and tactics and cultural significance of Amazon in The one-click civilization.

And writing at the website FiveThirtyEight, Ryan P. Burge and Perry Bacon Jr. explore why It’s Not Just Young White Liberals Who Are Leaving Religion.

Enjoy your reading this week.

More to come…

DJB

Photo of New York Public Library Reading Room by Patrick Robert Doyle on Unsplash

Selling your soul for a mess of pottage: The politics of morality and racism

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Reckonings require honesty. To face false beliefs and turn harmful habits into positive action for change, we have to begin with deep introspection at the personal level. We have to understand what we have given up of great long-term value for attractive, short-term gains.

Over the past month, three books have pushed me to deepen the serious look at my beliefs and privileges; my past actions and potential pathways forward. As three historians delved into their own lives and principal areas of study, they unknowingly illuminated key elements of my life, my story.

Sometimes we need words designed to trouble our minds and sear our souls.

What is my story?

  • First, I was raised in a culture that honored people who led a rebellion against a democratically elected government in order to perpetuate slavery, with ramifications that are as present as the nearest cable news show.
  • Second, my father spent his career working for one of the best-known and longest-lasting legacies of the New Deal, a legacy that continues to matter today even if it is often dismissed and under attack.
  • Finally, I was raised in a religious tradition that was founded to perpetuate chattel slavery and that has used the cudgel of morality and racism to disenfranchise those — especially people of color — who are viewed as different.

In each instance I’ve moved beyond childhood beliefs and heroes. But these three historians helped me see that reckonings are a lifelong journey of understanding, gaining knowledge of what we’ve surrendered of great value to obtain our personal mess of pottage.

The past two Mondays, I’ve considered this story on More to Come. Southerner and West Point historian Ty Seidule wrote of his reckoning with the Lost Cause beliefs in his life and the need for facing the myths in our personal histories, mine included. Last week, I reflected upon historian Eric Rauchway’s work on why the New Deal matters. His call for recognition that belief in a common purpose can serve as a model and inspiration in our current crises was a reminder of the many ways my father modeled that “building for the public good” mentality in his life.

Which brings me to the third piece of my personal story.

Historian, associate professor of religious studies at the University of Pennsylvania, and public commentator Anthea Butler has written a valuable and timely book full of powerful truths we need to hear today. White Evangelical Racism: The Politics of Morality in America is part history, part personal reflection, part call to action all wrapped together in a vital sermon that pulls no punches. For those who see the title and respond, “But not all evangelicals are racists” or might add that there are progressives within the evangelical tent, she tells her story of being marginalized as a person of color even by “good people” in that tradition. It is a story worth considering.

Butler’s introduction — entitled Evangelical Racism: A Feature, Not a Bug — sketches the key points one will find in this short yet important work. She provides a concise history of the evangelical movement, but more importantly she focuses on “the racist and racial elements that imbue its beliefs, practices, and social and political activism.” This book is aimed at two audiences, beginning with those who grew up in, or continue as a part of, the evangelical tradition. People like me. She also wants those who cannot comprehend “evangelicals support for current-day politics that seem draconian and unchristian” to understand that their support for those policies is linked inescapably to the tradition’s foundational history.

Butler asserts that

“The hard truth is that evangelicals are one of the most, if not the most, polarizing voting groups in America, and the racism, sexism, and patriarchal structure of their movement has embedded itself within the Republican Party…Racism is the key to this strange story. Because of racism, evangelical decency was lost, and evangelicals’ resentments grew.”

In noting that the northern American Baptists and the Southern Baptist Convention (the church of my childhood) still remain separate entities, Butler makes the point that churches exist in, and remain true to, the social structures of the regions where they are located. To make Christianity fit, evangelical leaders have found scriptures to buttress those structures. Not many evangelicals today cherry-pick scripture to support slavery, but there is plenty of selective reading to justify sexism, patriarchal structure, hatred, racism, and exclusion.

In the latter half of the twentieth century, I grew up watching Billy Graham’s “crusades” on the television and hearing that selective translation of the Christian message. Evangelical leaders like Graham, working in concert with anti-New Deal corporate CEOs who wanted cheap labor and politicians who wanted power, focused on communism as the godless threat to America.* It was only a short leap to then view the civil rights movement as “a potential communistic arm of destruction in America.” Today, when evangelicals and Republicans want to demonize an opponent, the go-to epithet is updated to socialism, as if caring for the welfare of citizens is the exclusive province of the right. People of color, and their representatives in government (e.g., AOC), are often among the first to be labeled, fairly or not and with little understanding of what socialism means or stands for in today’s world.

Butler focuses on Graham’s words and actions because he was such a powerful force in taking evangelicalism mainstream. She notes that in Graham’s understanding, “true Christian born-again believers could not possibly hold communistic views.”

“While for white evangelicals personal salvation was the first order of business, during this era the second order was for born-again Americans to embrace ‘Americanism’ as a way to protect the nation and its citizens from the communist threat. Simply put, ‘Americanism’ meant pride in the nation, in the founders, in the Declaration of Independence and the constitution — and, most important, in the idea that America was a nation ordained by God to save the world….”

“If an American citizen did not live morally and become saved, then the nation as well as the individual would suffer. Graham’s take on the linked fate of citizens, government, and nation held the seeds of a nationalistic Christianity, predicated on Christian morals and beliefs as the cornerstone and foundation of the nation, despite the fact that the founders wanted religious freedom for people of all faiths.”**

If you have wondered where the call for patriotic education in the last administration arose, those two paragraphs sum it up pretty well.

There is much to learn from this book, from the whitewashing of racism into the “colorblind gospel” to the story of the political alliance of groups such as evangelicals and Catholics that historically opposed and feared each other. Butler makes the case in her book that racism is, in the end, what brings groups with demonstrably different religious beliefs together in the current politics of morality.

Writing It’s time to break the traditions of white nationalism in our civic institutions in the Washington Post, educator Walter Greason makes the point that white nationalism has infiltrated so much of our civic life, not just religion. Butler would no doubt agree, but her laser-like focus is on the evangelical tradition of her youth, and the intolerance that white nationalism has brought to our nation.

“Evangelicals’ political, moral, and theological concerns had come together to create a harsh and uncaring posture toward suffering and disaster. Rather than seeing events like 9/11 or Katrina as man-made murders or natural disasters, they chose to blame the dead, dying and suffering for moral infractions that violated deeply held evangelical beliefs. At the same time, evangelicals constantly referred to themselves as victims, a persecuted minority because of their faith. These contradictions, and this strategy of evangelicals to use morality as a cudgel to mask racism, became a regular feature of the Bush era and beyond, setting the stage for the much more virulent, in-your-face racism of the 2008 election and its aftermath.”

In a powerful conclusion entitled Whom Will You Serve?, Butler says evangelicals must decide between people and power. She lays out the case that the attraction of power, and the absence of that power for decades as the nation was led by well-heeled Presbyterians and Episcopalians, has led to the evangelical embrace of racism. Whiteness is what gave them power, and although not all evangelicals are white, the underlying agreement is that whenever one is saved they give up whatever racial or ethnic or religious world they came from to embrace the white, Euro-centric version of Christ.

“The bile and hatred of some of the leaders you emulate make it impossible for people to believe whatever witness you have left. While you are clinging to God and guns, mothers are clinging to pictures of children who have been shot dead in classrooms, in streets, in malls, in cars.”***

Butler calls on evangelicals to move beyond the words of well-meaning Baptist pastors after the George Floyd murder. “You must join with people you don’t agree with in order to make a more perfect union, as the founders wanted.” Move out of silos and stop listening to those who profit from your isolation. “I am one of those people,” you need to engage with, writes Butler.

“I know you. I don’t like the lies you’ve told yourself, and continue to tell yourself and others, in order to try to hold on to power….Can you step past the individual sin of racism and understand that your votes, your choices, your actions participate in the structural support of white supremacy and racist policies and policing? Can you start to engage honestly and truthfully the actions of the leaders and politicians you support, to whom you have sold your souls for a mess of pottage? Can you step away from the headiness of being in the position of power to see the brokenness of your neighbors and the nation?”

Butler writes to trouble us and sear our souls. She asks us to think, deeply and profoundly, about the legacy our past and present actions will leave for the future.

Finally, she asks us to be hopeful, understanding that there is time. That time is now.

More to come…
DJB

*See my linked review of Kevin Kruse’s One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America

**See that same review for John Barry’s Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul

***Speaking of evangelical leaders who diminish (an understatement) the witness of those from this tradition, as this post was being written, news organizations began to report on a $10 million lawsuit by Liberty University against Jerry Falwell, Jr. which claimed that his loose lifestyle hurt their brand.

NOTE: Anthea Butler spoke recently at an event for our local bookstore, Politics & Prose. The video of that conversation is attached.

Image by Matthias Lipinski from Pixabay

The musical wizardry of Darrell Scott

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Darrell Scott is a musician’s musician. A talented songwriter and wordsmith, he has crafted hits and musical memories for some of the best. He makes a solo acoustic guitar sound like a full band, with twists and turns on the fretboard that surprise and delight. Scott’s expressive singing voice can take the best-known work of some of America’s greatest songwriters and bring out surprising interpretations that are totally his own. As a collaborator, he easily moves between supporting his bandmates with inventive rhythm tracks on the guitar, banjo, or dobro while stepping forward to add just the right lick or vocal harmony when needed to take the song to new heights.

He is, to put it simply, a favorite for many of those “in the know,” and we’ll explore his musical wizardry in today’s Saturday Soundtrack.

Patagonia fly fishing ambassador, environmentalist, musician, explorer, and talented writer Nathaniel Riverhorse Nakadate has been featured in various fly fishing, surfing, and guitar magazines and publications around the globe. When he writes about Darrell Scott, it is poetry.

“There is an absence of light, before the light.  A simple bare stage in the waning gloaming, and I can see Darrell make his way to a lone microphone.  He is here to shine that light on matters of the heart─the grit, grease, gristle, and most importantly, the marrow beneath the breastbone.

And what is the path that shapes us as we go along, those true defining moments without which we would be hollow versions of our current selves?  For Darrell, it was coming from a musical family with a father who had him smitten with guitars by the age of 4, alongside a brother who played Jerry Reed style as well.  From there, things only ramped up with literature and poetry endeavors while a student at Tufts University, along with playing his way through life.  This would never change.

Darrell Scott 07 12 14

When those hands of his make their way across the strings and fretboard, there is palpable loss of air in the theater, as the listeners, our feet and bodies firmly on the ground, watch his sonic wings take him upwards in flight, and realize we are as along for the ride through the skies as he is.  Inevitably, to feel this being channeled, privy to this shared physical space, is both heady and inspiring.  Small are the number of things in life which allow us to be so deeply immersed and mesmerized by a moment that we are unable to even be aware of the rest of the world humming and whirring away outside.  This is Darrell Scott terra firma, where he takes us, with these otherworldly gifts.“

I first heard Darrell Scott perform at MerleFest, a venue he’s returned to again and again, and I’ve also heard him at Red Wing as seen in the photo above. To hear Darrell Scott live is to understand his artistry and power in the visceral and deeply immersive way that Riverhorse Nakadate describes. (Note: Pandemic-willing, Scott is slated to perform at the Rams Head in Annapolis on July 20.)

Darrell Scott has been known as a top-shelf songwriter for quite some time. His You’ll Never Leave Harlan Alive, about the life of coal miners in Harlan County, Kentucky, was one of the early songs that demonstrated his uncanny ability to tell a short story in song.

“In the deep, dark hills of eastern Kentucky
That’s the place where I trace my bloodline
And it’s there I read on a hillside gravestone
‘You will never leave Harlan alive‘

Well my grandad’s dad walked down Katahrin’s Mountain

And he asked Tillie Helton to be his bride

He said, “Won’t you walk with me out of the mouth of this holler

Or we’ll never leave Harlan alive”

Patty Loveless performed a beautiful and heartfelt version on her Mountain Soul album, and in the live performance she introduces it by talking about the coal miners in her family. When she and Scott get to the aching chorus, you know they both know where they came from.

“Where the sun comes up about ten in the morning

And the sun goes down about three in the day

And you fill your cup with whatever bitter brew you’re drinking

And you spend your life just thinking how to get away“

Scott also made a pocketful of royalties for writing The Chick‘s hit Long Time Gone. This is a tune that Scott often sings with his collaborator Tim O’Brien since they released it together on 2000’s Real Time album. In this live version taped in Raleigh, NC, you get a sense of Scott’s guitar skills just a little over a minute into the song. Then, check out the interplay between Scott and O’Brien beginning at about the 3:30 mark. With their great improvisations, they sound like two very experienced tight-rope walkers having a blast.

When I mentioned to a client who shares my musical sensibilities that I was going to feature Darrell in a Saturday Soundtrack, he immediately responded by writing, “To me, his opening two tracks on Theater of the Unheard are just incredible — two of the best back-to-back songs on any album I own.” Theatre of the Unheard is an early album of music that was actually written a decade before this release for an unfulfilled project, and to my mind the production is a little heavy handed. However, when my friend wrote that “’He was not my father’s brother, but wished that he could be’ in Uncle Lloyd is one of the more captivating opening lines of any song I’ve heard,” I had to include it here.

“He was not my father’s brother

But he wished that he could be

Told us kids to call him Uncle

We would be his family

He had a wife and kids in Fresno

The youngest one was twenty-four

Daddy brought him into our house

They didn’t want him anymore“

Another example of Scott’s mix of innovative guitar work, stellar songwriting, and soulful vocals can be seen on this live version of Still Got a Ways to Go.

“Time is slowly ticking, taking all our youth
Beelzebub and chosen one have both been in cahoots
They play us like gin rummy and they’re cheating on the side
While we gaze into a broken mirror like Frankenstein’s bride
I wish someone could tell me something I don’t already know
It’s been some hard living, still got a ways to go

Rooster in the hen house, hit man on the phone
Low man on the totem pole, can’t get no time alone
I’ve been seeking satisfaction for this gnawing in my soul
I build a house like Andrew Jackson if that were my only goal
I’m looking for a change to come but brother, change comes slow
And it’s been some hard living, still got a ways to go“

Travis Tritt had a country hit with Scott’s It’s a Great Day to Be Alive. In the live version below, the songwriter’s original has a more bluesy feel. His Hank Williams’ Ghost is also another Scott song that I include to show the range of his work.

In 2010, I included a review of A Crooked Road on More to Come to showcase another fine collection of songs.

However, one of my favorite Darrell Scott albums is one where he didn’t write any of the selections. It is his ode to the influential songwriters of his youth, Modern Hymns. As Steven Stone writes in Vintage Guitar,

“This isn’t the first album on which Scott has displayed his interpretive abilities, but here he tackles a wider range of material. Song choices include Gordon Lightfoot’s ‘All The Lovely Ladies,’ Guy Clark’s ‘That Old Time Feeling,’ and Kris Kistofferson’s ‘Jesus Was a Capricorn.’ Others are musically further afield, such as Pat Metheny’s ‘James,’ Leonard Cohen’s ‘Joan of Arc,”’and Paul Simon’s ‘American Tune.’”

Regardless of the source, by the second bar, every song sounds like a Darrell Scott tune. He combines old-timey textures with modern tin-pan alley sensibilities in a unique way, luxuriating in the harmonies and changes of each song. Scott frames Adam Mitchell’s ‘Out Among the Stars’ with a full a capella choir, then performs his most striking musical transformation with ‘Joan of Arc.’ Mary Gauther sings the lead with a world-weary timbre while Scott delivers the answering ‘fire’ part of their duet with an intensity that matches Cohen’s rendition from Jennifer Warnes’ Famous Blue Raincoat album.…

To understand how a songwriter’s mind works, you must listen to how they perform covers. On Modern Hymns, Darrell Scott delivers 12 striking performances that illuminate his unique style.“

Jesus Was a Capricorn resurrected (pun intended) a great, but not-often-heard Kristofferson song with the classic line “I reckon we’d just nail him up if he came down again.” Oh how true. And his interpretation of Adam Mitchell’s Out Among the Stars is, to my ear, the best take anyone has made of this searing and deeply emotional short story.

I’ll end with two other interpretations by Scott of the music of other songwriters. His most recent album is Darrell Scott Sings the Blues of Hank Williams and it includes this lovely version of Lost Highway.

In 2010-2011, Robert Plant revived The Band of Joy for an album and tour, and Scott joined Patty Griffin, Buddy Miller, Byron House, and other stellar musicians for the gig. Each night on tour, Plant asked Scott, Griffin, and Miller to take the lead on a song of their choosing. As Scott tells in the intro to a solo live version, he started playing the old Porter Wagoner hit A Satisfied Mind, and the beauty of the lyrics and harmonies stuck. I’ll leave you with The Band of Joy‘s live version and, I hope, a very satisfied mind.

Enjoy.

More to come…

DJB

Weekly Reader: Infrastructure week…with sprinkles!

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After four years of an administration that turned the words “Infrastructure Week” into a synonym for any “unsuccessful or clumsy attempt to get an actual policy off the ground,” not to mention that administration’s “odd tendency of pushing infrastructure whenever unfavorable headlines start appearing in the news” (i.e., every week), we have a new gang in town. And guess what? They actually know how to get things done.

As always, this Weekly Reader features links to recent articles that grabbed my interest or tickled my fancy. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry.

Writing in The Daily Kos, Laura Clawson notes that the five Cabinet secretaries tasked with pushing the administration’s infrastructure plan through Congress are mayors and governors whose old jobs involved gaining approval for — and then implementing — infrastructure projects. Biden’s infrastructure sales team comes with a lot of experience with asphalt and power struggles. It is what mayors and governors do. Competence counts.

There are questions, mostly political, about what encompasses infrastructure, but bridges are one thing that falls within everyone’s definition. The Washington Post’s art and architecture critic, Philip Kennicott had a wonderful interactive online piece about the good, bad, ugly, and new in the region’s bridges entitled D.C.’s bridges have a complicated history, with the new Frederick Douglass span rising above the rest. (The rendering at the top of the post is of the new Douglass bridge.)

“But although waterways are omnipresent, and often a nuisance (when rush hour arrives), they don’t really give shape to the city’s psychology. Unlike other cities, where urban life throngs to the waterfront, Washington-area residents seem only intermittently in love with their rivers. We know they’re there, and sometimes we visit. But while the map reminds us that the Potomac is tidal and connects us to oceans beyond, mentally, we are landlocked.

Perhaps that explains why, despite the watery setting, Washington is not quite a city of great bridges. Yes, the graceful arches of Arlington Memorial Bridge have an elegance worthy of an old European capital, and the muscular engineering of the Francis Scott Key Bridge has an appealing formal rigor. But for every good bridge, there is a terrible bridge. The vast majority of commuters who cross a bridge en route to the District enter the city on ugly and utilitarian structures, including the 14th Street Bridge and its dispiriting upstream cousin, the Theodore Roosevelt Bridge. Some of the city’s best bridges — those spanning Rock Creek Park — don’t cross a major river. They were built to a higher standard because they served the interests of real estate developers who were creating a privileged enclave of Whiteness in the city’s Northwest quadrant.

A new bridge, however, is rising in Washington, and its soaring arches signal deeper change. The Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge, the largest infrastructure project in the city’s history with a price tag near $500 million, isn’t just the first major D.C. bridge to reach for the sky — it represents a revolution in how the city thinks about its waterfront. The people who designed and are building it call it a “gateway,” and that word also indicates a transformation in local bridge thinking. Bridges are both functional and metaphorical, and the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge is changing the metaphors the city uses to describe its relation to water, waterways and the waterfront.“

Airports and bus terminals are also part of most definitions of infrastructure. But it doesn’t help when you have a bus terminal in an airport, disguised as a gate. Washington managed to pull that off for a couple of decades. Also writing in the Washington Post, Dan Zak speaks for many of us in his less than fond remembrance: DCA airport’s infamous Gate 35X is gone but not forgiven.

“There was no flourish to its badness. Gate 35X at Reagan National Airport did not have the utilitarian exotica of the Dulles people-movers, trundling across a tarmac Tatooine. It did not have the high-low smack of Union Station, where travelers are welcomed by the Roman arches of Constantine but digested through a boarding area that feels like the waiting room of an ER. Gate 35X wasn’t a vortex like the Springfield Interchange, or a labyrinth like the Metro station at L’Enfant Plaza. Gate 35X didn’t qualify as a municipal quirk, like Washington’s lack of a J Street. Gate 35X was just a bus station. In an airport.

Except, somehow, it was more than that. It was a funnel, a choke point, a cattle call. One gate, as many as 6,000 travelers per day. The ceilings were lower. The seats were all taken, as were the electrical outlets. There was no bathroom down there, no vending machine, no water fountain. Dante’s circles were over-invoked. The complaining was olympic.Queues kinked in our slow sprint to somewhere else, through a bay of four doors, via shuttle rides that were short distances but long journeys, onto small regional jets bound for second-tier American cities.“

I flew in and out of 35X dozens of times. It was just as bad as Zak describes it. Good riddence.

We will end with two pieces about Geico’s Scoop, There It Is commercial. Like so many other fans who watched March Madness, I quickly fell in love with the quirky pitch for cheaper insurance. Now, I knew nothing about Tag Team, or — believe it or not — their hit song. So if you are as clueless as me, you should read Clinton Yates enlightening piece in The Undefeated, Behind the delightful success of Tag Team’s hit commercial with Geico.

“French Vanilla. Rocky Road. Chocolate. Peanut Butter. Cookie Dough.

When senior copywriter Roger Hailes penned those nine words, alongside just two measures of music, he probably didn’t know how many lives would be changed as a result. For the past two months, one commercial has overtaken the advertising world through an incredible coming together of a classic tune, a powerhouse marketing campaign and, of course, the hip-hop capital of the world: Atlanta.“

“…for D.C. Glenn and Steve Gibson, the rap duo from Atlanta, the track that won the 1994 Razzie Award for Worst Original Song has definitely provided them with the last laugh, as well as laughs for plenty of other families for generations to come. You might have called it corny, they called it positive partying. It is most undoubtedly impactful.“

Read the entire article to learn about the improv actors who join Tag Team to make this a memorable pitch that was almost about soup! Thankfully, we got “sprinkles!”

“None of that was scripted, nor was the sprinkles toss, arguably the top moment of a 40-second ad with like 10 of them.

It was conceived as an ode to LeBron James. 

‘You know, sprinkles came from an ode to LeBron James where he goes to the scorers table and throws up the chalk. And I know kids love sprinkles,’ Glenn said. ‘I wanted this commercial to be with little kids, saw it, they’d go, mama, I want to party like that.’”

And, of course, all good things must end. Kevin Lutz gives us a helping hand in McSweeney’s with The Five Stages of Grief When Dealing With No Longer Being Able to See the “Scoop, There It Is” Geico Commercial. The third stage is “bargining”:

“’What if I double my GEICO insurance?’ and convince yourself that if you never turn your TV off, the commercial will never stop airing. But these efforts will be futile, as the end of its advertising cycle is out of your control. One of the hardest parts of dealing with loss is realizing you are helpless and that there is nothing you can do to stop the inevitable.”

Have a good week reading.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Rendering of Washington, DC’s Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge (DC Department of Transportation)

Belief in a common purpose

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Forces today that would fracture community and democracy in order to gain money and power are reminiscent of challenges from an earlier era. It was March of 1933, and the nation had just chosen a new path out of an economic depression and in the midst of global uncertainty. The leader selected was a new, optimistic president who wanted to get things done.

And so, with that decision made, and a few last weeks of winter to get through before the spring on which so many had placed their hopes, the families huddled in American homes were able to take comfort one weekend, for the first time in a long time, in what the President of the United States had to say to them: that with the ‘money changers’ out of power, it was time to ‘apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.’…The country must pull together, and ‘realize as we have never realized before our interdependence.'”

In a wonderful new book in the Yale University Press Why X Matters series, historian Eric Rauchway has written Why the New Deal Matters. Rauchway has not sugar-coated the failings of Franklin Roosevelt’s effort to pull the country out of the Great Depression. But he understands—at a fundamental level that the right-wing and libertarian commentators at places like the Cato Institute will never grasp—why it meant so much to America at the time and why it still has resonance today.

The New Deal mattered then, at the cusp of spring in 1933, because it gave Americans permission to believe in a common purpose that was not war. Neither before nor since have Americans so rallied around an essentially peaceable form of patriotism. The results of that effort remain with us, in forms both concrete and abstract (emphasis added).

Rauchway, one of the best historians to ever write about the New Deal, takes the reader to five specific places to look at the impact and legacy of FDR’s brainchild to pull the country from the worst crisis of the 20th century. He ties this work to our present time as a source of inspiration as to how we can respond to the greatest crisis to date in the 21st century. In the process, Rauchway shows how much of the safety net that we take for granted even in the midst of a pandemic—Social Security, rural electrification, small business loans, federal insurance on your bank deposits, a minimum wage, disability insurance, unions, regulation of global finance—is a benefit of the New Deal.

Rauchway begins his trek at Arlington National Cemetery at the graves of two World War I veterans who were shot and killed in Washington, DC, while participating in the Bonus Army. When veterans began to die of starvation in the early onset of the Great Depression, many came to Washington to make the case for government assistance and to demand bonuses that were rightly theirs. The story of that army “allows us to see what might have happened to American democracy if the New Deal had not begun in 1933 and if, instead, the United States had continued policies akin to those of the preceding administration.” As we saw in the 1930s and as we are seeing today, democracy is not a given in the U.S. or around the world. “The foundational belief of the New Deal,” writes Rauchway, “was the conviction that democracy in the United States—limited and flawed though it remained—was better kept than abandoned, in the hope of strengthening and extending it.”

A visit to the Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA) Norris Dam on the Clinch River shows that the New Deal matters not only for the legacy of public works projects, but for the visionary thinking about ecology and clean, sustainable energy. Rauchway connects the dots between the economic development in an impoverished section of the country, electrical power, modernist design, and the development of the atomic bomb at Oak Ridge, powered by the energy of the Tennessee River to create “the most destructive force ever put to use in the history of war.”

The Navajo Nation’s Window Rock, along with San Francisco’s Hunter’s Point, are used to address the failings of the New Deal to combat the country’s racism toward Native Americans, Blacks, Asian Americans, and Latinos. At Hunter’s Point, a whole region was transformed in ways that especially affected African Americans. But Rauchway notes that while people of color may have had less reason to feel positive about the New Deal, many of them nonetheless saw the greater promised it held out for the country in the future.

WPA-era post office in Silver Spring, MD

Finally, Rauchway asks us to take a walk around outside our homes, in our neighborhoods. It almost doesn’t matter where you live, because you will find elements of the the New Deal all across the country, in either concrete or abstract ways. It may be a Works Progress Administration-era (WPA) building, such as our old post office, or a WPA roadway, such as the Sligo Creek Parkway, both in Silver Spring. It may be one of the twenty-four thousand miles of new sidewalk laid by the WPA, as near our home in Woodside Park. It may be the commitment to a more inclusive man-made world (to borrow Roosevelt’s phrase), which was the most important characteristic of the New Deal programs for public works and can be seen in sidewalk ramps that were important to a president who struggled with accessibility. It may be through artwork, which told the story of democracy and depicted the value of New Deal labor, playing an outsize role in the program’s success.

Tom Brown at Sewanee
Tom Brown at the power station at Sewanee, TN

My father was an engineer with the Tennessee Valley Authority, graduating from Vanderbilt University after World War II on the GI Bill. He worked his entire career to build “for the public good” as the New Deal motto of TVA phrased it. With the inspiration provided by my father, I grew up believing in the common good and in the value of community. I was a child of the New Deal, and believe Rauchway has written a stirring call for using this flawed but ultimately important program as inspiration for our times.

“The ongoing crises of our times have, like the Depression, shown that we need something of the New Deal’s effort to restructure the nation and the world.

The New Deal sought fundamentally to change the United States by introducing, in the phrase Roosevelt used, ‘the broadening conception of social justice’ to American life. The Depression revealed to a wider public the injustice and poverty long visited upon whole classes of Americans: tenants, laborers, farmers—as Roosevelt said in 1937, ‘one third of a nation’—and the New Deal sought to redress these issues….As he had stated in 1932, the nation could not address the present crisis by seeking ‘merely to restore’; it must ‘restore and at the same time remodel.’…

The New Deal’s effort, incompletely realized but doggedly pursued, of improving the economy by improving democracy, remains an outsized ambition even today.”

Highly recommended.

More to come…

DJB

Image: Norris Dam from TVA Design for the Public Good